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Design Questions

Quality courses

  • "Grokking the System Design Interview" by Design Gurus - This is probably the most famous system design interview course on the internet and what makes it different from most other courses out there is that it is purely text-based, which is great for people who refer reading over watching videos (such as myself!). It contains a repository of the popular system design problems along with a glossary of system design basics. I've personally completed this course and highly recommended many others to use this.
  • "Grokking the Advanced System Design Interview" by Design Gurus - I haven't tried this but it's by the same people who created "Grokking the System Design Interview", so it should be good! In my opinion you probably wouldn't need this unless you're very senior or going for a specialist position.
  • "Best of System Design" package by Design Gurus - This bundle allows you to purchase both System Design interview courses by Design Gurus at a discount. Best of all, it's lifetime and not subscription-based.
  • "System Design Interview Course" by Exponent - This course covers system designs basics and has a huge database of popular system design questions with videos of mock interviews. Some of the questions have text answers and a database schema and APIs for reference (which I find helpful). While the subscription might be a little pricey for just the system design interviews content, they also offer quality technical content for Data Structures, Algorithms and Behavioral Interviews. The convenience of a one-stop platform which covers all aspects of technical interview preparation is very enticing.

Guides

Flow

A. Understand the problem and scope

  • Define the use cases, with interviewer's help.
  • Suggest additional features.
  • Remove items that interviewer deems out of scope.
  • Assume high availability is required, add as a use case.

B. Think about constraints

  • Ask how many requests per month.
  • Ask how many requests per second (they may volunteer it or make you do the math).
  • Estimate reads vs. writes percentage.
  • Keep 80/20 rule in mind when estimating.
  • How much data written per second.
  • Total storage required over 5 years.
  • How much data reads per second.

C. Abstract design

  • Layers (service, data, caching).
  • Infrastructure: load balancing, messaging.
  • Rough overview of any key algorithm that drives the service.
  • Consider bottlenecks and determine solutions.

Source: https://github.com/jwasham/coding-interview-university#system-design-scalability-data-handling

Grading Rubrics

  • Problem Solving - How systematic is your approach to solving the problem step-by-step? Break down a problem into its core components.
  • Communication - How well do you explain your idea and communicate it with others?
  • Evaluation - How do you evaluate your system? Are you aware of the trade-offs made? How can you optimize it?
  • Estimation - How fast does your system need to be? How much space does it need? How much load will it experience?

Specific Topics